City Council Survey Reveals Depth Of Election Day Issues

Empty voting booths stand waiting for New York residents to cast their vote in the US mid-term elections at a polling station at a school in Harlem in New York, November 2, 2010. President Barack Obama's Democrats face a day of reckoning as US voters headed to the polls in an election likely to see Republicans seize control of the House of Representatives and gain broad new powers to attack his agenda. AFP PHOTO/Emmanuel Dunand (Photo credit should read EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images)

Empty voting booths (credit: EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images)

NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — A New York City Council survey showed that about one in three voters encountered problems in the general election.

While not the “royal screw-up” described by Mayor Michael Bloomberg during the primary elections, the survey revealed issues with ballot design, the type size and a lack of privacy at polling places, 1010 WINS’ Senior Correspondent Stan Brooks reported.

Council Speaker Christine Quinn chided the Board of Elections for not evaluating its own performance during and after the elections and demanded action.

“This is something the board should already be doing and should be providing to the City Council — not the other way around,” Quinn said.

“It’s extraordinary that the legislative body got good government groups and we went out and got this data versus the entity that is charged with running elections getting this data.”

In a release on its website, the City Council published a number of feedback comments from voters participating in the survey.

“Between the low light and tiny print, the ballot was almost unreadable. I didn’t have my reading glasses with me, so I hope I marked it correctly,” one voter from Washington Heights said.

“The print is too small. I felt like I was taking an Eye Exam,” another from Sheepshead Bay quipped.

“We can have the fanciest and the best voting system in the country, but if voters can’t read the ballot, we have an enormous problem,” Quinn said.

Voters also commented that so called “privacy booths” were too close together and that many voters needed assistance with their ballots, which in many cases required individuals to expose their preferences to poll workers.